It probably depends on Windows version as well, and my Win98 experience is likely irrelevant. But I did find that Poser could seem stalled in the early stages of preparing for a render, when loading objects and textures. Possibly because it doesn't know what the total size of the objects and textures might be, it doesn't display a progress bar. If you're using shadowmaps, and many lights which cast shadows, you can have a considerable overhead at this stage, but you do get the progress bar. I found that switching to raytraced shadows, at least on the complexity of scene which I was rendering, increaded the actual render time but, by eliminating the shadowmap stage, improved the total start-to-end time. It's also clear that speeds plummet when virtual memory is used. I suspect, based on imperfect knowledge, that Poser's internal workings interact badly with Windows virtual memory operation. By eliminating shadowmaps, I suspect that raytraced shadows may reduce virtual memory paging. I'm not in this for the money, or I would go for WinXP and a lot of RAM. The point about enough RAM for Windows, on top of the program, has been true ever since Win3.1